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Fedor Krause

Fedor Krause (March 10, 1857 - September 20, 1937) was a German neurosurgeon who was native of Friedland (Lower Silesia).

He originally studied music at the Conservatoire in Berlin, and later switched to medicine, earning his doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1883 be became a medical assistant to Richard von Volkmann (1830-1889) at the surgical university clinic at Halle. Afterwards, he was a pathologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt am Main (1890-92), a surgeon at the city hospital at Hamburg-Altona (1892-1900), and later head of the surgical department at Augusta Hospital in Berlin. In 1901 he became an associate professor at the University of Berlin. While in Berlin, he worked closely with neurologist Hermann Oppenheim (1858-1919).

During World War I he served as a surgical consultant, and following the war embarked on scientific journeys to Latin America, where he introduced neurosurgical practices into several countries. In 1931 Krause retired from medicine, devoting his last years to artistic and musical pursuits in Rome.

Krause was a pioneer in the field of neurosurgery, and with Otfrid Foerster (1873-1941) was responsible for introducing surgical operations for treatment of epilepsy into Germany. During his career he performed over 400 operations on epileptic patients. He is also remembered for his work in plastic and reconstructive surgery, and was an early practitioner of intraoperative electrostimulation of the cerebral cortex.

He developed a number of operative techniques involving tumors of the brain and spinal cord. The eponymous Hartley-Krause operation is named after Krause and surgeon Frank Hartley (1857-1913). This procedure involves an excision of the Gasserian ganglion and its roots to relieve trigeminal neuralgia.

Today the German Neurosurgical Society awards the “Fedor Krause Medal” for outstanding work in the field of neurosurgery.

On 23 December 1908, the German surgeon Fedor Krause (1857 - 1937), who worked at the Augusta Hospital in Berlin together with the German neurologist Heinrich Oppenheim (1858 -1919), was the first to operate on a disc prolapse in a patient who had suffered from severe sciatic pain for several years and had developed an acute cauda equina syndrome 1901.

The operation consisted of: • laminectomy L2-L4 • splitting the Dura • mobilizing the cauda equina by a retractor • exploring the operation field • removing a small tumor mass after the operation, the patient felt much better and the neurological problems disappeared. Following the theory of Luschka, Krause and Oppenheim supposed that this fibrocartilage mass was an enchondroma.

The Krause operations

Some of Fedor Krause's contributions to operative technique are reviewed and portrayed as fundamental steps in the progress of neurological surgery. The approaches he devised, the “Krause operations,” are exposure of the trigeminal ganglion and root, of the cerebellopontine angle, and of the pituitary (transfrontal) and the pineal (supracerebellar) regions. This review recalls the significance of the aggregate body of Krause's work, which has not been fully appreciated except by his compatriots
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